Bad Influences from Outside: State Anti-cosmopolitanism in Hobbes’ Leviathan

Abstract

homas Hobbes' ideas concerning the right education of the citizen and the subsequent sense of indoctrination caused by the dissemination of foreign political teachings into native English lands, is an issue of great interest that has been largely overlooked in the relative literature. This article is a part of the work in progress which aims to broaden the discussion concerning Hobbes' thoughts about education and the prominent position that this aspect holds in his civil science as a whole. The main focus of this text is to explore Hobbes' proclaimed concerns about the unrestricted dissemination of political knowledge among misinformed citizens with controversial beliefs and about the possible undesirable consequences of this dissemination. The term "State anti-cosmopolitanism" that I will be employing here proposes a reading of Hobbes that detects elitist and exclusivist (hence anti-cosmopolitan) operations at work in his political theory of pedagogy. It will be shown that Hobbes singles out the instructor and scholar as the paradigmatic cosmopolitan figure of the time. This figure is "provided with the antidote of solid reason" 1 and by being protected from the risks of indoctrination, he thereby protects the "borders" of learning and staves off the political consequences that Hobbes deems dangerous to the masses. For the purpose of this analysis I mainly concentrate on Leviathan while sporadically drawing insights from Hobbes' mature works that resonate with his educational thought. 2